Google Spreads Its Superspeed Internet Into New Playground

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Google Spreads Its Superspeed Internet Into New Playground

Google Fiber began as a shaming exercise. The company would build an ultra-high-speed fiber internet network in one lucky city, and the rest of the country's providers would be forced to follow suit.

But it turned out that the country's ISPs are shameless.

Last month, Time Warner Cable Chief Financial Officer Irene Esteves claimed – apparently with a straight face – that customers didn't really want gigabit-speed internet connections. "We’re in the business of delivering what consumers want, and to stay a little ahead of what we think they will want.... We just don’t see the need of delivering that to consumers,” she said at a conference in San Francisco.

Meanwhile, Verizon has suspended expansion of its own high-bandwidth fiber internet service, which happened to be both more expensive and slower than Google's.

So Google has decided to expand its network into other cities. This week, the company announced that it will expand Fiber beyond Kansas City, Missouri, and into Olathe, Kansas, one of the state's fastest-growing cities. Olathe is about a 30-minute drive away from Kansas City, so it's not a big geographic leap from Google's existing service.

But Olathe citizens shouldn't get too excited yet. There's no word on exactly when the service will be available. "We still have a lot of planning and engineering work to do before we’re ready to bring Fiber to Olathe," reads Google's announcement. "Once we get those processes underway, we’ll be able to announce more about pre-registration and construction timing."

But the move supports Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt's claim that Google is serious about Fiber. "It’s actually not an experiment; we’re actually running it as a business," Schmidt said at The New York Times' Dealbook Conference last year.

Some communities aren't waiting around for Google – or anyone else. Lafeyette, Louisiana, and Chattanooga, Tennessee, for example, have built their own high-speed fiber networks. And cities like Chicago and Seattle are forming partnerships with businesses to bring faster connections to citizens.

The process of bringing the U.S. internet infrastructure up to speed is slow going, but at least, after years of stagnation, we're seeing some progress.